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What is going on right now?

(catskull.net)
378 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | 22 Aug 25 07:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.45s | source
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popcorncowboy ◴[22 Aug 25 13:53 UTC] No.44984731[source]▶
This ends in Idiocracy. The graybeards will phase out, the juniors will become staff level, except.. software will just be "more difficult". No-one really understands how it works, how could they? More importantly WHY should they? The Machine does the code. If The Machine gets it wrong it's not my fault.

The TRUE takeaway here is that as of about 12 months ago, spending time investing in becoming a god-mode dev is not the optimal path for the next phase of whatever we're moving into.

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ivanjermakov ◴[22 Aug 25 14:19 UTC] No.44985016[source]▶
I'm afraid we already in the phase where regular devs have no idea how things work under the hood. So many web devs fail on the simple interview question "what happens when user enters a url and presses enter?" I would understand not knowing the details of DNS protocol, but not understanding the basics of what browser/OS/CPU is doing is just unprofessional.

And LLM assisted coding apparently makes this knowledge even less useful.

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1. const_cast ◴[22 Aug 25 14:41 UTC] No.44985257[source]▶
Met a dev who couldn't understand the difference between git, the program, and github, the remote git frontend.

I explained it a few times. He just couldn't wrap his head around that there were files on his computer and also on a different computer over the internet.

Now, I will admit distributed VCS can be tricky if you've never seen it before. But I'm not kidding - he legitimately did not understand the division of local vs the internet. That was just a concept that he never considered before.

He also didn't know anything about filesystems but that's a different story.

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2. ryandrake ◴[22 Aug 25 17:20 UTC] No.44987153[source]▶
This seems like a common theme around very young computer users: Applications and operating systems have, for over a decade, deliberately tried to blur the line between "files on your computer" and "files in the cloud". Photo apps present you a list of photos, and deliberately hide what filesystem those photos are actually on. "They're just your photos. Don't think too much about where they are!" The end result is that the median computer user has no idea that files exist in some physical space and there is a difference between local and remote storage.

My kid struggles with this. She can't intuitively grasp why one app needs the Internet and another app does not. I try to explain it but it all goes over her head. The idea that you need the Internet when your app needs to communicate with something outside of the phone is just foreign to her: In her mind, "the app" just exists, and there's no distinction between stuff on the phone and stuff on the network.